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To Care for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement
To Care for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement
To Care for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement
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To Care for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement

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Controversial megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll proclaimed from a conference stage in 2013, “I know who made the environment and he’s coming back and going to burn it all up. So yes, I drive an SUV.” The comment, which Driscoll later explained away as a joke, highlights what has been a long history of religious anti-environmentalism. Given how firmly entrenched this sentiment has been, surprising inroads have been made by a new movement with few financial resources, which is deeply committed to promoting green religious traditions and creating a new environmental ethic.

To Care for Creation chronicles this movement and explains how it has emerged despite institutional and cultural barriers, as well as the hurdles posed by logic and practices that set religious environmental organizations apart from the secular movement. Ellingson takes a deep dive into the ways entrepreneurial activists tap into and improvise on a variety of theological, ethical, and symbolic traditions in order to issue a compelling call to arms that mobilizes religious audiences. Drawing on interviews with the leaders of more than sixty of these organizations, Ellingson deftly illustrates how activists borrow and rework resources from various traditions to create new meanings for religion, nature, and the religious person’s duty to the natural world.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 26, 2016
ISBN9780226367415
To Care for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement

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    To Care for Creation - Stephen Ellingson

    To Care for Creation

    To Care for Creation

    The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement

    Stephen Ellingson

    The University of Chicago Press

    Chicago and London

    Stephen Ellingson is associate professor of sociology at Hamilton College.

    The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

    The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

    © 2016 by The University of Chicago

    All rights reserved. Published 2016.

    Printed in the United States of America

    25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36724-8 (cloth)

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36738-5 (paper)

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36741-5 (e-book)

    DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226367415.001.0001

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Names: Ellingson, Stephen, 1962– author.

    Title: To care for creation : the emergence of the religious environmental movement / Stephen Ellingson.

    Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

    Identifiers: LCCN 2015045697 | ISBN 9780226367248 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226367385 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226367415 (e-book)

    Subjects: LCSH: Environmentalism—Religious aspects. | Ecotheology. | Nature—Religious aspects. | Human ecology—Religious aspects.

    Classification: LCC BT695.5 .E576 2016 | DDC 201/.77—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045697

    This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

    To Zach

    Contents

    Acknowledgments

    ONE / A Greener Faith

    TWO / The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement

    THREE / Mission, Strategy, and the Search for Legitimacy

    FOUR / Creating Religious Environmental Traditions

    FIVE / Coalition Building and the Politics of Cooperation in the Emergent Movement

    SIX / Conclusions: Embeddedness, Strategic Choices, and Religious Social Movements

    Appendix

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

    Acknowledgments

    This book took much longer to write than I anticipated, and I accrued numerous debts to those who helped me along the way. First I must thank the interviewees who graciously gave their time and thoughtful answers to my questions. Many sent me additional documents and pointed me toward other REMOs to include in the study. A small number of interviewees read a rough draft of the manuscript in 2014 and offered helpful comments. The Louisville Institute funded a year of data collection during the 2007–2008 academic year (grant #2007004). Hamilton College provided two sabbaticals at the start and end of the project without which the book would not have been possible. The Arthur C. Levitt Center at Hamilton College funded a summer research project in 2011 that jump-started the analyses for chapters 2 and 4 and gave me the opportunity to present my findings to colleagues across the college on two occasions.

    I benefited from the help of numerous individuals as well. Chris Ansell, Chris Henke, Richard Seager, and Rich Wood provided methodological advice or suggestions about religion and the environment at the outset of the project. I would not have been able to write chapter 5 without the network analysis conducted by Vernon Woodley and Tony Paik that was the basis for our coauthored article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (June 2012). Marcia Wilkinson efficiently transcribed all of the interviews. Several extremely capable undergraduate students coded data and wrote annotated bibliographies (Alexandra London, Sarah Boole, Katie Axelrod, Dan Rudel, Emma Leeds) or conducted preliminary analyses about the emergence of the movement and the development of a green religious ethic (Will Rusche and Andrea Wrobel). My colleagues in the Sociology Department—Yvonne Zylan, Jaime Kucinskas, Jenny Irons, Dennis Gilbert, Ben Dicicco-Bloom, and Dan Chambliss—read the manuscript and provided telling critiques, helpful suggestions, and encouragement. Phil Devenish carefully read the manuscript and pushed me to clarify my arguments in numerous ways. Stacey Himmelberger reformatted all of my notes, figures, and bibliography, and copyedited the manuscript. Bret Olson reworked the two figures from chapter 5 in Photoshop. Robin Vanderwall, my department’s administrative assistant, provided invaluable support in countless ways throughout the course of the study. All of these members of the Hamilton College community deserve my thanks. At the Press, Doug Mitchell provided much encouragement, support, and sage counsel about the revisions to the book. His assistant, Kyle Wagner, patiently and efficiently responded to my numerous queries, and the reviewers of the manuscript offered extremely helpful suggestions to improve the book.

    Finally, I wish to thank my family for tolerating my many lapses of attention during the months of writing over the past two years. My partner, Jennifer DeWeerth, good-naturedly read the manuscript twice and caught many typos, grammatical mistakes, and poorly constructed sentences. My youngest son, Mesafint, pulled me away from the project and onto the soccer field (or at least to soccer practices) several times a week for the past few years, which has been a welcome diversion. The intrusion of cancer into the life of our family nearly derailed the book altogether. On April 19, 2010, my oldest son, Zach, was diagnosed with leukemia, and I stopped working on the project. For the next three years Zach endured daily chemotherapy, numerous blood transfusions and spinal injections, and the awful physical, emotional, and psychological effects of cancer treatment. Throughout the ordeal he taught me what courage is, how to endure more patiently, how to love more fiercely, and how to be a better human being. He has brought more smiles and tears into my life, and he has inspired me in more ways than he knows. Today, Zach is healthy and in remission and I dedicate this book to him.

    ONE

    A Greener Faith

    From 2007 to 2008, I interviewed more than sixty religious environmentalists who were establishing a new social movement. Near the end of the interview period, I had the opportunity to spend the day with Paul Gorman, the founder and executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE). Throughout the early 1990s, Gorman organized a series of conversations between religious leaders from different communities, and in 1993, the NRPE was established. The NRPE is a coalition of national Jewish, Evangelical, Catholic, and mainline Protestant religious organizations dedicated to environmental activism. Gorman had a front-row seat—really a driver’s seat—during the formation of the religious environmental movement. He was reluctant to use the word movement and instead offered a number of alternative terms—awakening, paradigm shift, renewal, reconciliation—because movement did not seem to capture adequately the radical changes to religion and environmentalism that the NRPE hoped to initiate. Gorman explained that during the early conversations about establishing the NRPE, they decided that their goal would go beyond replicating the old forms and practices of religious activism. We weren’t trying to create another interfaith organization or a new organization about human rights or peace. . . . Some of us were very aware of an obligation to set the foundation for this and not be another trendy issue or movement or something that people grab onto as a flavor of the month or a year or a decade. He went on to note that they weren’t simply trying to create a new reform movement like the Social Gospel movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a way for liberal and justice-oriented religious groups to stay relevant. He claimed that their endeavor was something new altogether. Then he sat up on the couch in his living room, leaned forward and in a voice filled with emotion said:

    We’re not the environmental movement in prayer. We’re trying to bring care for God’s creation to the heart of religious life, or to weave programs to care for God’s creation across the entire path of religious life. And henceforth, to be religious means if you love your neighbor, you care for creation. . . . Care for creation brings life to faith, it revivifies faith. Wasn’t this the idea in the first place? Isn’t God’s creation and God’s revelation calling us into the most intimate relationship? . . . To be one with God, we must be part of God’s creation. That’s the deal; that’s the original deal.

    At this point of the interview, I had a something of an epiphany—Gorman’s comments alluded to God’s original designs for humankind in the Garden of Eden and the hope of restoring the divine-human relationship that lies at the heart of the Judeo-Christian traditions. This new movement was as much about the renewal of faith as it was about saving the environment. On my interview guide I had jotted down my insight, not the environmental movement in prayer; not the shock troops for an embattled and rudderless green movement at large. Religions were not simply trying to persuade Congress to enact environmentally sound legislation, nor were they eager to join hands with the secular movement to slow global warming. Instead, they were hoping to forge a new wave of environmentalism and in doing so, to renew and deepen religious faith.¹ In one of the documents Gorman forwarded to me after our interview, God’s Climate Embraces Us All, the NRPE stakes out its mission more formally, clearly distinguishes religious environmentalism from the secular movement, and summarizes the organization’s goal of revitalizing faith by integrating it with environmental activism:

    How can religious life help make climate change a moral issue? Deep religious values are having fresh power for people of faith in that first generation to behold the whole earth, precious and in peril. In Genesis, God designates creation as very good (Gen. 1:31) and commands us to till and to tend the garden (Gen. 2:15). In Psalms we read, The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof (Ps. 24:1). We have a paramount obligation to care first for the least of these (Matthew 25:35) and to assure the future well-being of all life on Earth in God’s "covenant which I make between you and every living creature for perpetual generations" [italics original]. These values are flowing vividly into worship, sermons, and religious observance. They’re inspirations, not frames, living articles of faith, not talking points. They are the reasons why care for God’s creation is becoming the most compelling new cause in religious life and why global climate change is the issue that is most moving people of faith to act.

    When I returned home, I reread the interview transcripts and quickly discovered that most of my informants had also spoken about the movement in similar terms. Their goal, like that of the NRPE, is to awaken religious congregations and/or individuals to environmental problems and to take action because it is a sacred duty. Religious environmental movement organizations (REMOs) put forth the claim that environmentalism is integral and necessary for an authentic and meaningful life of faith. The point of religious environmentalism is to deepen and enrich the lives of the faithful and then to ameliorate ecological problems. I began to see religious environmentalism in a new way. It is not another social movement, nor is it simply an effort to renew or revitalize religion, which is how scholars have historically treated religious social movements.² It is a movement that attempts to renew faith and to mobilize the faithful to save creation. But just what is novel about religious environmentalism in comparison to older religious social movements? Are REMOs fundamentally different from secular environmental movement organizations, or are they simply a variation of the postindustrial, new social movements (NSMs) that stress identity and nonmaterialistic goals?³

    In many ways the new religious movement does not follow the model of the Sierra Club or other major national environmental organizations. REMOs that participated in the study are not staffed by professional activists that rely on lobbying, litigation, or legislation to save nature. They are clergy and laypersons, deeply enmeshed in specific religious communities that are engaged in a novel attempt to mobilize and change the culture of American religions by placing concern for the environment at the heart of faith. They do not use the language of science or politics to describe their work, but instead they use the idioms of stewardship and justice, covenant and redemption that are central to many religious traditions in the United States. They do not offer gloom-and-doom scenarios of ecological destruction or technical discussions of how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, they offer a hopeful vision of how God wishes to save all of the creation, and they articulate a call to respond to God’s commandments and promises about nature.⁴ REMOs focus on awakening religious groups and individuals first before solving specific ecological problems. They tend to work on ecological issues that have a clear impact on human beings, and thus they downplay traditional environmental goals of protecting wilderness areas and endangered species. They eschew long-term ties to secular environmental organizations and are even wary of entering into short-term projects with their secular counterparts. Instead, they have developed a parallel movement, replete with a unique set of religious goals and strategies, culture, and collective identities. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, REMOs have shown members of America’s religions that environmentalism is congruent with and even mandated by religion itself. They have begun persuading individuals and groups that to be fully and authentically religious also means that one must be an environmentalist.

    Why have religions taken up the cause of environmentalism? The environment has not been an active concern among most religious organizations in the United States, and secular movement organizations have made few efforts to ally with national religious bodies or local congregations. However, during the early 1990s, activists from a variety of religious traditions established a small number of independent, nonprofit religious environmental organizations, and since 1997, more than seventy such groups have been founded. Collectively, these organizations have launched a new religious environmental movement and have gained an institutional foothold within American religion. REMOs have created a new green religious ethic and culture where none had existed and launched programs to make religious buildings environmentally friendly, fight toxic waste and mountaintop removal, protect watersheds, and promote sustainable agriculture.

    The successful emergence of this new movement is no small accomplishment given the number of institutional challenges the organizations face. Religious environmentalists are trying to mobilize an indifferent, sometimes hostile, and certainly distracted audience. The environment is not a core issue within any American religion, and as multi-issue organizations, denominations and congregations are fully engaged in a variety of human-centered social activities (for example, food pantries, relief, and development work). In addition, activists have few allies within denominations or other religious bodies. Conservative Protestants and Catholics tend to equate environmentalism with antireligious liberalism and have expressed little interest in supporting new initiatives on the environment, particularly if those initiatives will take them away from their core interests in evangelism and the public issues surrounding the cultural wars. During the 1990s and early 2000s, internal fights over sexuality, membership declines, and persistent revenue shortages consumed liberal and mainline Protestant groups, and thus there was little energy and even fewer resources within these groups to support a new environmental initiative. Moreover, poll data suggest that Christians’ attitudes about the environment and green practices have not strengthened since the 1990s, and that non-Christian and nonreligious Americans continue to hold stronger proenvironmental beliefs and attitudes than Christians.⁵ Other studies suggest that liberal Protestants and Catholics tend to hold stronger proenvironmental beliefs than conservatives, but there is no compelling evidence to suggest that any particular tradition or denomination within American Christianity is becoming green.

    Until recently, American religions had given little attention to developing a theology or ethics about the environment, and the small amount of work that had been done by scholars and denominational officials about faith and ecology was largely unknown at the congregational level or ignored within particular national churches. In order to gain a hearing and then garner the legitimacy and support necessary to become established, activists must create new green religious traditions and a new collective green religious identity. They must persuade people who have historically believed they are ethically required to care for human beings that it is also religiously necessary and legitimate to care for nature. In short, REMOs faced strong barriers to legitimacy, they found themselves with few resources on which to draw, and they faced audiences that would be difficult to mobilize.

    The rise of religious environmentalism raises intriguing questions about movement emergence, the development of a new type of movement organization, and the creation of new religious traditions. This book explains how religious environmentalism emerged despite various institutional and cultural barriers, and why the new movement organizations follow a logic and set of practices that set them apart from the secular movement. Drawing on interviews with leaders of sixty-three REMOs, the book tells three new stories. First, it is an account of how entrepreneurial activists tap into and improvise on a variety of theological, ethical, and symbolic traditions in order to create a compelling call to arms and strategies to mobilize religious audiences. It also shows how activists work within the limits imposed on them by their own religious communities and the paucity of resources to create a new type of movement organization and launch the new movement. While there are a few scholarly monographs on the US religious environmental movement and a handful of articles, they do not provide a very compelling and complete answer to the questions of how and why the new movement emerged and developed. Therefore, this book offers a deep and comprehensive description and explanation of this potentially important new wave of environmentalism in the United States.

    Second, the book develops a cultural-institutionalist perspective of movement emergence and institutionalization that incorporates the concept of embeddedness. The most common sociological explanations for movement emergence do not fit the case of religious environmentalism very closely. The resources mobilization perspective claims that new movements cannot emerge when there are not an accessible and sizeable amount of human, financial, technical, and moral resources. Yet REMOs were founded and continue to operate with extremely limited resources. Work within the political opportunity structure (POS) and the more recent strategic action fields approach of Fligstein and McAdam argue that new movements and movement organizations emerge when the political system grows unstable or institutions face some type of crisis.⁷ However, REMOs are not oriented toward or interested in working within the formal political system. They act with little regard for the state or changes in leadership within state and federal governments. Moreover, the movement emerged over a roughly twenty-year time period that saw numerous shifts in the control of Congress, judicial rulings on the environment, and a welter of ecological crises, yet its emergence cannot be easily pegged to clearly identified political events or shifts in opportunities. In general, scholars have tended to emphasize the structural factors that are associated with the emergence of new social movements or describe the sociopolitical contexts, events, and crises that compel new groups to engage in protest. However, such approaches do not adequately explain the concrete dynamics and process of emergence or theorize how activists exercise agency within and despite the limits of structure. Thus the case of religious environmentalism poses a theoretical puzzle—how did this new movement emerge with few resources, in a context that was not particularly opportune, and with no clear institutional or political crisis that called for a religious response?

    In order to understand how this new movement emerged, I argue that we need to explain how activists and the REMOs they operate address a series of challenges about organizational identity and legitimacy, authority and resources, religious authenticity, and integrity. In particular, I show how such decisions and actions are constrained and facilitated by their embeddedness or deep connections to specific religious organizations, audiences, and systems of meaning. For example, many Christian and ecumenical activists feel pushed to use the language of stewardship and to emphasize projects that will have a direct impact on human beings because of the constraints they experience from the communities they were trying to mobilize. These communities lack a historic commitment to the environment and a practical theology or ethic supportive of environmental action. Instead they stress the religious mandate to care for their neighbor. Similarly, evangelicals’ deep suspicion about working with non-Christian organizations forces evangelical REMOs to eschew alliances with REMOs that would not be considered Christian by members of the broad evangelical community. In sum, I show how institutional, relational, and cultural embeddedness profoundly shape activists’ decisions about every step of the movement’s emergence and development—decisions about mission and goals, organizational form, protest tactics, alliance formation, and framing.

    Third, this book integrates theories and concepts about cultural innovation and social movement emergence and development. Religious environmentalists face a difficult organizing problem: how to persuade religious individuals and groups that holding a proenvironmental identity and engaging in environmental action are integral and not inimical to the life of faith. I show how activists borrow, adapt, and rework resources from various religious traditions to create new meanings about religion and nature, and the religious person’s duty to the natural or created world. Existing scholarship on innovation has identified some of the creative strategies and staked out a contextual argument to explain when innovations are likely to occur, and I build on this body of work by identifying the cultural and structural constraints on the innovative process. More specifically, I show how environmental entrepreneurs are constrained by the expectations (real and assumed) of their key constituencies and by the relationships they have with specific religious organizations. In other words, innovation is limited by the nature of activists’ embeddedness within particular religious settings and traditions. Thus the book fine tunes and integrates theories about cultural innovation with social movement emergence and development by demonstrating how creativity and agency are constrained, channeled, and enabled by different types of institutional embeddedness.

    The Study

    In 2005, I wanted to start on a new project on American environmentalism and began reading histories of the movement. After making my way through several monographs and a significant number of articles, I was struck by the absence of religion in the movement. It seemed odd that religions were not involved in environmentalism given that religions, especially Protestant denominations and congregations, have played central roles in nearly every major American social movement. Local churches, denominations, and parachurch organizations have provided the ideological and material resources, and developed the repertoires of contention, that fueled the antislavery and temperance movements in the nineteenth century, and the peace, civil rights, and pro-life movements in the twentieth century. Religious organizations and their members also have been deeply involved in national movements regarding immigration, nuclear weapons, capital punishment, homosexuality, and, more recently, in a growing number of efforts at the local level to improve neighborhood safety, public schools, and opportunities for affordable housing and job training.⁸ Recent surveys of American congregations reveal the central role congregations play in providing social services for the needy and, more generally, in trying to change the world through social services, advocacy, and moral suasion.⁹ At the same time, I began reading journalistic accounts of new religious organizations that were petitioning Congress not to drill in the Arctic, becoming involved in public discussions about global warming, or investing in green energy. It appeared that religions were going green, but little scholarly attention had been directed to this new phenomenon.

    Intrigued, I conducted a pilot study during the summer of 2005. I interviewed six religious leaders who represented three mainline denominations, two ecumenical parachurch organizations, and one evangelical environmental group. I also spoke with five activists from secular environmental groups whose focuses ranged from wilderness preservation to toxic waste issues. I collected documents—annual reports, newsletter and magazine articles, denominational and parachurch groups’ official statements or theological writings on the environment. By the end of the summer, I was convinced that a new religious social movement was developing and decided to make it the focus of my research in the coming years. I compiled a list of politically active or policy-oriented organizations employing faith-based approaches to environmental issues by combing through information from the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, the National Council of Churches Eco-Justice Program, the Web of Creation, the Forum on Religion and Ecology, and the Sierra Club’s annotated directory. I also asked each interviewee to name other faith-based environmental organizations to make sure I had not overlooked any REMOs. I excluded organizations with no political or policy agenda because they did not meet the criterion of being a movement organization.¹⁰ Because I relied primarily on published lists to identify REMOs, it is likely that smaller, lesser-known REMOs were omitted. In all, I identified a population of eighty-three REMOs as eligible to participate in the study, and representatives from sixty-three, or 76 percent, agreed to be interviewed (see the appendix).

    Between August 2007 and July 2008, I conducted one-hour phone interviews with the executive directors or equivalent representatives of REMOs in the United States.¹¹ The telephone interviews were recorded and later transcribed. The interview schedule was organized into four broad topics: (1) REMOs’ history, characteristics, and environmental goals and activities; (2) interorganizational

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